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Playing games, making games

My year 7 science class has just finished the topic Forces. There is a week left in this term and I didn’t want to start the next topic so I decided to do revision with them. Students often ask me for revision lessons, but they are always disengaged in them. Revision lessons often involve students doing repetitive questions that do not require them to engage in higher-order thinking. So I decided to have my year 7s play games and make games to revise. I’m also trying to have my lesson activities tap more into the higher levels of Bloom’s digital taxonomy.

I used the website classtools.net for the year 7s to play the games and make the games. Today we revised scientific investigations. We started with an easy worksheet, Scientific Investigations, which was followed by the class playing the wordshoot game on classtools.net based on the questions on the worksheet.

On the next lesson the students will work in pairs to make their own game on a topic we’ve done this year. They will use this planning sheet, Game Plan, to devise the questions and answers then make the game on classtools.net. They will then evaluate each others’ games on our class blog to justify which game they liked the best and why.

Hopefully this activity will make my year 7s use more of their higher-order thinking skills. Creating something fun to revise has to be much better for them than doing boring worksheets.